MSI Afterburner

MSI Afterburner is all things considered a good software (I just hate the themes they apply by default, it just looks obnoxious). It is quite reliable, provides a performance overlay (RivaTuner statistics), and allows us to adjust a lot of parameters for GPUs.

Some interesting take aways are that there are 4 main parameters we could adjust :

  • Core voltage
  • Core clock
  • Memory clock
  • Power limit

And we could adjust temperature limit as well as fan speed. But I ended up keeping those untouched in my target setup.

Basic parameters

Basic parameters refer to those values. A fist way to reduce heat (at the cost of performance), is to simply reduce the power limit. Less power to the GPU means less heat, and less noise. There’s however a possibility of increased lag spikes if you were to go too low on power limit. If a program suddenly requires a lot of power, the GPU could not provide it.

Another way is to adjust the core voltage. By reducing the voltage, you will get similar (or possibly better) performance, while using less power. Physics !

Finally, you could also change clock speeds. However, it won’t do much by itself for my goals.

The power of MSI Afterburner

MSI Afterburner (and NVIDIA on Windows in general) allows us to change voltage, and even the entire curve. It means we can finely adjust the voltage the GPU will try to run at for a specific frequency.

Being able to reduce voltage while keeping the same frequency means we basically keep getting the same performance, with the benefit of using less power.

Of course, reducing voltage too much will create instability (and driver crashes). It is something each person has to adjust for their own hardware.

A quick note

Before I forget, just know that when you upgrade your drivers, MSI Afterburner may lose previous changes.

I’d suggest backing them up somewhere, and if you notice changes to your adjustments, just dump your backup.

The folder, if you followed default installation, is the following :

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSI Afterburner\Profiles

NVML

Now that I linked the Linux article to the Windows one, I can create a link loop.

Indeed, the NVML wrapper I wrote and talked about in the Linux Wayland section can (theoretically) also be used on Windows. I haven’t tested it, just thought I’d mention it.